DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Realm vs. Tarantool

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Realm vs. Tarantool

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

In-memory computing platform with a flexible data schema for efficiently building high-performance applications

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

with Tarantool/GIS extension

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	1.72
Rank	#144	Overall
	#25	Document stores
	#25	Key-value stores
	#66	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

realm.io

www.tarantool.io

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

realm.io/docs

www.tarantool.io/en/doc

Developer

Amazon

Google

acquired by Google 2014

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Initial release

2012

2010

2014

2008

Current release

2.10.0, May 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

BSD-2, source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Tarantool Enterprise

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

Erlang

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

BSD
Linux
macOS

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Flexible data schema: relational definition for tables with ability to store json-like documents in columns

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, double, decimal, uuid, integer, blob, boolean, datetime

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Open binary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

C
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Lua, C and SQL stored procedures

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Change Listeners

yes, before/after data modification events, on replication events, client session events

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding, partitioned with virtual buckets by user defined affinity key. Live resharding for scale up and scale down without maintenance downtime.

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

Asynchronous replication with multi-master option
Configurable replication topology (full-mesh, chain, star)
Synchronous quorum replication (with Raft)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Casual consistency across sharding partitions
Eventual consistency within replicaset partition

when using asyncronous replication
Immediate Consistency within single instance
Sequential consistency including linearizable read within replicaset partition

when using Raft

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

yes

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

ACID, with serializable isolation and linearizable read (within partition); Configurable MVCC (within partition); No cross-shard distributed transactions

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes, cooperative multitasking

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, write ahead logging

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

In-Memory realm

yes, full featured in-memory storage engine with persistence

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

Access Control Lists
Mutual TLS authentication for Tarantol Enterprise
Password based authentication
Role-based access control (RBAC) and LDAP for Tarantol Enterprise
Users and Roles

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.